Fic: Mathematics: Five Faces (6/10) (Second Half)

[kappamaki33]

Sam’s words rang in Felix’s ears as he shuffled down the street.  You don’t choose what you feel.  If anybody would understand how he’d felt about Gaius, it would be Sam Anders, Felix thought.  Starbuck certainly hadn’t slept around as much after her marriage as Felix knew Gaius had after they’d gotten together.  Even so, everyone knew about her and the ex-Pegasus marine, and her and the man who used to play the piano at Marty’s Place, back when people still went out at night to Tent City’s few makeshift bars and cafes.

It was probably even easier for Felix to rationalize his lover’s wanderings than it was for Sam to rationalize Kara’s, Felix thought.  No matter what praises of Felix’s young, lithe body Gaius whispered in his ear to make Felix pliant and flushed, it was always clear that Gaius couldn’t give up his passion for chasing skirts.  Felix had hated it, and it had never stopped stinging to meet women coming out of Gaius’s bedchamber in the mornings when he went in to brief the President, but he had accepted it.  The stream of women gave Gaius something Felix couldn’t, but Felix comforted himself with the belief that he gave Gaius something even more important that they never could.  The girls changed; Felix was the only constant.  That’s probably what Sam said to himself, too, Felix mused as he tramped along.  He and Sam were probably both fools.

Once the Six arrived, though, Felix hadn’t even had that frail consolation to cling to.  From the moment he’d heard the soft tremble in her voice when she addressed Gaius by name, Felix had known it was over.  That hadn’t been what had killed Felix, though; he’d accepted that the Cylons would get whatever they wanted, and if the Six wanted Gaius, Felix certainly couldn’t stop her.  It was the look on Gaius’s face, not love or adoration, but recognition and guilt, that had, after everything, finally broken Felix’s heart  He’d told himself that it was because Gaius had known Shelley Godfrey, or it was because of the Six from the Pegasus, but he’d never quite believed it.  There were other ways that look on Gaius’s face could have come about, Felix knew.  The possibilities were haunting Felix more today than they usually did.  As he quickened his pace, Felix found himself replaying in his mind the one time he’d had the courage and opportunity to ask Eight about it.

He’d done it when he and Eight were lying together on Felix’s cot in the pitch black night.  After the second bombing of the power plant made it clear that there would be no electricity for most of the city any time soon, Eight and Felix had taken to conserving their candles.  They knew there would likely be a shortage by winter, so they only used them for work at night, for government projects Felix brought home with him and for the lists.  Felix had been glad when Eight hadn’t objected to him breaking away from her to snuff out the candle when she slid her hands under his shirt.  “No point in wasting them for something that works just as well in the dark” was what she’d said.  Felix hated to admit it, but it worked better for him, not having to see her face and remember she shared it with Boomer and the Sharon in Galactica’s brig.

But even more important was what the darkness did to him.  Felix had heard the cliché of people losing themselves in sex, and though he was sure he wasn’t feeling what those people had been talking about, it was the best way to describe what happened each time: focusing on sensation, on touch, so intently, that mind and memory and even the unseen body below him dissipated into nothing.  More than once, Felix had wondered if this was what Gaius had meant when he’d trotted out that tired phrase.

And then there he and Eight had been, tangled together but invisible to one another on Felix’s little cot, the sweat already making their skin feel clammy in the chilly night air.

“Gods, I needed that,” Felix breathed, happy to not really be lying.  He felt Eight arrange her body flush against his side and lay her head on his shoulder.  She sighed sleepily.

“Don’t the others ever wonder where you are the nights you stay here?” Felix asked.

“No.  Why?” she mumbled into his skin.

“I don’t know, I thought the Cylons wouldn’t be too happy about you being with a human so much, even one they think is their toady.  They don’t seem very happy about the Six with Gaius, after all.”

“None of them know, and I’ve always got good excuses for being out.”  Eight pulled the blanket up around them higher.  “Quit worrying.  Sleep.”

It was the perfect opening for the question he’d wanted to ask for weeks.  He played it as nonchalantly as he could.  “What’s going to happen if I slip up, though?  I know better than to get caught by the seven Cylons I know about, but what about those other five?”

“What?”  Suddenly, Eight sounded much more awake.

Felix kept his tone casual and rubbed Eight’s back lightly, hoping to keep her calm and sleepy enough that she wouldn’t notice Felix pushing her on the subject.  “Because there are twelve of you, right?  But there are only seven on the Cylon Council.  The only seven I’ve seen on Colonial One, and at the worksites.  I might make a mistake in front of one of the other five and not even know it.”

He felt Eight’s whole body stiffen.  “We’re programmed not to think about the Five.”

“If you don’t want to tell me, just be honest about it.”

“I am being honest about it.”

“You’re not programmed,” he chuffed in disbelief.

Felix felt some of the tension leave the body beside him.  “What makes you so sure I’m not?” she asked, her tone completely serious and tinged with something that might have been hope.

Because you can’t be, he thought to himself.  Because if you are, all of this is for nothing.  “Well, considering what you’re doing with me-”

Eight cut in, “But Boomer was with Chief Tyrol, and she was the best sleeper we-”

“What you’re doing with the lists, not the frakking,” he said, doing his best to convey his smile in his voice, expecting Eight to laugh a little, too.  He was surprised that, instead, Eight met him with stony silence.  For once, Felix wanted to see her face, just to know where he stood with her.  He tried again.  “Besides, you’re not at all like Boomer.  Of course none of us knew-none of us could have known-but in hindsight, there were a lot of things, like blank spots in her memory that didn’t make sense, and lies about things that nobody would’ve questioned if she’d simply forgotten them, lots of little things that didn’t quite fit.  You’re not at all like that.”

Apparently, he’d said something right.  Eight breathed slowly and relaxed into him, settling her head on his chest.  He decided to press his luck.  “Eight, would you tell me if…if Gaius was one of the five?”

At first it was just a chuckle rumbling in her throat against his ribs, but in a few seconds, Eight threw her head back in a full-blown laugh.  “I’m sorry,” she hiccupped as her laughter died down to a giggle.  “That just wasn’t what I expected you to ask.  And like I said, I honestly don’t know.”  She coughed to get herself back under control.  “Why?”

The story of “why” was far too long, and Felix had no desire to tell it.  He gave her an answer that wasn’t untrue but that admittedly glossed over some important details.  “I don’t know.  What you told me about projection, it got me thinking about the fugues Gaius has sometimes, how he gets so disoriented.  And the Six-he just fell into his relationship with his Six so easily, so I thought if maybe they had…  Yeah, I guess it does sound kind of laughable when I say it out loud.”  He bent his arm so he could run his fingers lightly over Eight’s hair.  “What did you think I was going to ask?”

Eight traced her fingers along his ribs.  “If you were a Cylon, of course.”

After Boomer, everyone who was honest with themselves had asked themselves that question.  As silly as it seemed in retrospect, a few days after Boomer shot the Old Man, Felix and Dee had locked both their unloaded firearms in Dee’s locker and all their clips in Felix’s so neither could get at both guns and ammo easily if the other suspected something was wrong with them.  They both knew it was futile, since there were plenty of weapons and ammunition on Galactica that either of them could get hold of if they really wanted to, not to mention ridiculous, since if they actually needed to use their weapons in an emergency, they’d only be able to get them if they could find each other and get the other’s locker combination.  But that’s what you do when you lose control, Felix knew: you rearrange the deck chairs on a sinking ship, take control over things that don’t matter, just so you don’t feel completely powerless.

“Well?  What’s your expert opinion on me, then?” asked Felix.

The playful fingers stopped and rested over Felix’s heart.  “I wouldn’t worry about it, if I were you.”

Felix shook his head pulled his collar up against the wind and the glare of the setting sun.  Secret Cylons were the least of his problems.  At least if he were a Cylon sleeper like Boomer he’d have a good excuse for all the conflict and uncertainty churning inside him lately, he thought bitterly.  He finally turned toward home.

Eight was home when Felix made it back to the tent late that afternoon.  No, it wasn’t right to say she was “home,” even though she spent so much time there, Felix mentally corrected himself.  She still had her own quarters on Colonial One, and she hadn’t even moved in symbolically in the way Felix had heard lovers do, leaving little forgotten mementos behind-a change of clothes, a toothbrush, a scent.  His tent remained completely untouched by Eight’s increasingly common presence.  He’d convinced himself it was a Cylon thing; he’d noticed the Cylons didn’t seem to get too attached to possessions and generally lived with as few physical things as they could get by with.  Felix guessed the insides of a basestar were quite Spartan.

“Busy day?” Eight asked, glancing up at him only for a moment before going back to feeding trash into the burn barrel stove.

“Guess so,” Felix said, sitting down at his desk.  “Ready for another list?”

“Yeah, it’s about time,” she said, not losing the rhythm of feeding scraps to the flames.

Felix took out a sheet of paper and a pen and wrote.  He liked how comfortable he and Eight had become around each other, how they had fallen into an easy routine, no longer afraid of making the other ill at ease.  When he finished, Eight stood up, and he handed the paper to her.

Eight read.  Then she took the pen out of Felix’s hand and drew lines through five of the names.  She muttered,  “I need more than four workable names to make it worth going in.  Give me some more, Felix.”

“What?”

Eight sighed, a little exasperated.  “This one, David Kaiber, we got him out already.  He was on the last list.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.  Are you feeling all right, Felix?”

“I’m fine,” he waved the comment aside.  “I haven’t seen Kaiber. Who else was on the last list?  Grannivan, Petro…”

“Didn’t you see them?  Oh, I’m sure you’ll see them tomorrow,” said Eight.

Felix shook his head, still in thought.  “Maher.  I saw his wife this morning on my way to work, but not him, and-”

“Felix?” Eight cut in.  She pressed her lips into a grim line, as if she were debating with herself how to continue.  “Have you ever considered that maybe you don’t see the escaped prisoners very often because they don’t want to be seen by you?  I don’t exactly tell them who my accomplice is when I let them out, and from the outside, you look like…well, you look like a collaborator.”

Felix winced.  Somehow it hurt more hearing that from Eight than all the things Tyrol had said earlier today combined.  “What about the others you crossed off?”

“I’ve told you, Felix, nobody high-profile.”

“Since when are Nellie Walker and Octavian Blue high-profile?” Felix said, standing up and looking over Eight’s shoulder.

“Since we found out they and this one, Callista Fenner, were the moles Doral was so hell-bent on finding.”

Felix’s head was spinning.  “Callista Fenner-what?  Those three just take dictation, do typing…”

“It was a surprise to everyone, which I suppose is what made them such good Resistance spies,” Eight said, smoothing out the paper in front of Felix.  “Doral was sure you were the leak.  In fact, the snare he set up for you is what tripped up the real moles.”  Eight held out the pen, but Felix didn’t take it; her gesture barely registered with him.  “Doral hid some important-looking information in a document he gave to Baltar and told Baltar to give it to you.  The information was all fake, so Doral knew that if the Resistance showed up at certain places at certain times, he’d know you’d gotten the information out.”

Eight didn’t seem to notice that Felix was frozen in horror.  She continued, “The Resistance finally did show up at one of those times and places to set up an ambush, and an NCP squad was there, ready to ambush them.  But it couldn’t have been you who leaked it out,” Eight said.  She took his hand in hers, placed the pen in it, and closed their hands around it.  “Caprica Six saw Baltar screw up the plan and tear up the documents you were supposed to get.  Since the typists who made the fakes were the only other ones who saw the fake information, it had to be them.”

Felix ran the events of that meeting with Gaius a week ago through his mind again.  Even at the time, Felix had noticed that something was off about the way Gaius had looked at him.  Gaius’s whole demeanor had changed when he knew the Six was watching.  Had he actually read the order?  Gaius had tried to pass it off so casually, maybe to get Felix to take it without looking too closely.  Could Gaius have guessed?

“Felix, why are you still here?”

No, he was wrong, Felix argued to himself.  Even if he wasn’t wrong, it was too little, too late.  It wasn’t enough that Baltar might be trying to save him.  Really, it was at most just another version of Baltar saving his own ass, assuaging a little guilt and keeping the efficient worker so the Cylons wouldn’t bother the President any more about the government.  It wasn’t taking a stand.  It wasn’t enough.  No matter how badly Felix wished it could be, it wasn’t enough.

“What about the fifth name you crossed off?”

Eight sighed.  “Felix, you know I can’t do anything about her.”

“I’m tired of hearing we can’t do anything about someone,” Felix said bitterly, pounding his fist on the table.  Eight flinched.  “I’m tired of playing a game that we can’t win, seeing that for every one person we let out, three more get thrown in.  Why can’t we quit fooling around and actually do something?”

“But Felix, we are doing-”

“No, no we’re not,” Felix said, standing up and pacing behind his desk.  Something fragile inside him that he’d protected for a long time snapped.  “It’s not your fault, but this plan-it isn’t getting us anywhere anymore.”  He stopped and stood up straight, but his mind kept reeling.  “No more hiding, no more slinking around under the dradis.  We sabotage the security system, cause a mass prison break.”

“I can’t do that…”

“Not on your own, but with my help, we could-”

“Felix, you do understand that the only reason my approach works is because I’m a Cylon?  You can’t slip in on legitimate business the way I can.”

“Doesn’t matter.”  Half-formed ideas and plans raced through Felix’s mind.  It felt so liberating to let them tumble out of his mouth without any more thought-no weighing and worrying and sneaking, just doing.  “We’re smart enough, we could find a way in that would buy us enough time to frak up the security measures.  Even if they caught us during the break, they’ll believe you if you want to tell them I forced you to do it, that I took you hostage-”

“Felix!” Eight snapped, her eyes blazing.  “I’m not going to help you commit suicide!”

Felix realized he’d never seen Eight truly angry before.  The fire in him died down a bit.  He sank back into the chair, and Eight sat on the desk beside him.  “It wouldn’t work, anyway,” she said softly.  “The humans can’t win, and that’s not what we’re trying to do anyway.  What we’re doing, it’s always a balancing act: how much can we push back, something that’ll do some good but won’t provoke retaliation against the civilians.  I know it must be even harder for you-”

“All right,” Felix cut her off firmly but not angrily.  He’d known that all along, of course, but he’d wanted to forget it and had hoped that Eight would have let him, if only for a little while.  “But we could push a little harder than we are without risking too much.  This ‘no high-profile prisoners’ rule of yours, for example.”

Eight answered by not really answering at all.  “This Kara Thrace you keep putting on the lists…were you in love with her or something?”

Felix snorted.

“Fine,” Eight said, clearly frustrated.  Felix lifted his chin and stared her in the eye defiantly.  She didn’t break from his gaze.  “No human is supposed to know this, and if you ever tell anyone, I will swear to God I never said a word about it.  I don’t know why it is you’re always so hell-bent on getting her out, but it’s never going to work.  Thrace isn’t just in detention.  The Two that Roslin airlocked-he became obsessed with Thrace.  We had to let him have her, because that’s the deal we cut to get the Twos to vote for settling with the humans in the first place.  I don’t know exactly what goes on between them, but he’s with her almost constantly.  There’s just no way, Felix.”

“I could help you find a way.”

Eight shook her head.   “Doesn’t matter.  Leoben would not rest until he’d hunted her down again.  And even if you did manage to get her out somehow…mentally, she’ll never leave that apartment.  Now, I’m sorry, but we have work to do, important work.  I can’t do it without names, though.”

She smoothed the paper out in front of Felix again.  He scribbled four more names on the list, then dropped the pen to the desk with a clatter.  “I need to go for a walk,” he said, shoving the chair out from behind the desk and leaving the tent before Eight could respond.

Felix headed straight for the garbage dump, cursing himself for not having done this sooner, for backing down from Eight, for always thinking about his next move so godsdamn hard.  If Tigh had the access and information Felix did, if Tyrol had it, if Sam had it, none of them would’ve even hesitated to use it to break open the prison gates, frak the consequences.  But that was why Felix was the man on the inside and they weren’t.

Felix knew why he kept putting Kara’s name on the lists, even though Eight had told him again and again it was impossible.  It wasn’t personal.  He didn’t like Kara-never had, never would.  Felix believed what he’d told Tyrol, that his staying on the inside wasn’t about gaining power or staying safe, but getting Kara out would prove to himself that there wasn’t any sort of self-interest still lurking under the surface of the more noble motivations he constantly repeated to himself like a mantra.

He cursed Eight under his breath. Even if they had merely tried to get Kara out, maybe he wouldn’t feel that he had to do this, he thought.  No, Felix chastised himself, it wasn’t fair to blame Eight for this.  Deep down, he knew he still would have felt bound to pass on the security plans for the NCP graduation ceremony now hidden in his jacket pocket.  It was what a good double-agent would do.  Even so, Felix had a sinking feeling that he couldn’t play both sides much longer.  A person can only play a part for so long before it devours or destroys him, and Felix was fairly certain he didn’t have many acts in this sick drama left in him.

Felix patted Jake absently and flipped over the dog bowl.  He stared at the old desk in the garbage dump as if this was a showdown.

He had a pen and paper in his pocket, too, thought Felix.  He could leave a note instead of the plans: “Starbuck is alive.”  Sam Anders was a good man; even if he figured out who left the note, he wouldn’t say anything.  The thought of leaving hope in that drawer for a change, rather than death, was so enticing…

Felix quickly drew the security plans out from under his jacket, put them in the drawer, slammed it shut, and stalked away as fast as he could without drawing attention.  Felix knew he couldn’t let that flicker of remorse and tenderness he’d seen in Gaius for what Gaius had done to him factor into this decision.  All that mattered was what President Baltar said and did, and the signature on the order was all too clear proof of where the President stood.  Anyway, after what Eight said, writing “Starbuck is alive” might very well be a lie, at least in any sense that could be a comfort to Sam.

Felix paused outside his tent.  He could see Eight’s silhouette in the candlelight; she was waiting up for him.  Sam Anders was right.  Felix knew that though she would have deserved it twice as much, he wouldn’t have felt half as conflicted if it had been her death sentence he’d just placed at the dead drop as he was over Gaius’s.  It wasn’t fair, not to any of them.

Felix let out a ragged sigh and then carefully arranged his expression into a composed smile.  He pulled back the tent flap and walked in.